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What the Jumans Didn't Know About Michael

There are a baseball and a bat etched onto Michael Juman's headstone. ''Cherished son and brother,'' the epitaph reads, ''Jan. 5, 1965 to Mar. 11, 1994.'' Michael's father, Martin Juman, braces against a brisk wind as he walks through the Wellwood Cemetery on Long Island to visit his son. ''He's waiting for answers,'' Martin says, looking at the grave. ''We promised him we'd find them.''

While Michael lived, particularly during his final years, his life was filled mostly with questions. Who was the woman who gave birth to him? Could she tell him anything about the demons that occupied his brain? Was there something in his genetic past that could explain the bugs that crawled around him -- insects only he could see? Or the keening bursts of rage that so frightened his parents? Or the frenzied fits that led him to pull clumps of hair from his own head?

This desperate need to know led him to search for his birth mother, who had been described to the Jumans by the adoption agency as bright and accomplished, the winner of a college scholarship, a woman who played the piano and helped support her widowed mother. She had been engaged to be married, the Jumans were told, but her fiance died suddenly of a heart attack. Michael was conceived during a brief rebound affair.

Michael's search, however, did not lead him to the woman herself, but rather to the stark realization that little he had been told about her was completely true. His birth mother was a lobotomized schizophrenic. His birth father was also a mental patient, whom she had met during one of her many years within a state institution. Agency workers knew this when they placed Michael with the Jumans, and they also knew it when his psychiatrist called years later and asked for his medical history, but they never shared that information.

No decision is made in a vacuum. Policies are not one-dimensional reflections of their creators, but also tell much about the times of their creation. Choices are inextricable from the milieu in which they are made. It is only through hindsight that this cause and effect truly becomes clear; not until the reasoning has changed is it possible to see that it had been there at all.

Such is the story of Michael Juman. In the decades between the agency's seemingly matter-of-fact decision to lie and his parents' agonizing discovery of that lie, the nature-versus-nurture pendulum swung from one extreme to the other. In 1964, genetic history could be dismissed as so meaningless as not to be mentioned. Now genes are thought to predict everything -- from personality traits to intelligence to risk for disease. Our present assumptions are not likely to weather the decades unchallenged, either, but it was through the lens of the present that the Jumans went looking into the past.

It has been a surreal, disorienting search. Every time they accepted a fact as certain, it transformed into something else. They thought they were the only ones with such a shattering story. They have since learned that there are others. They consoled themselves with the thought that the lies were an aberration of an earlier time. Now they are not so sure. Everywhere they look they find the ground shifting, the reality changing -- just like the world of science, and like schizophrenia itself.

Martin Juman visits Michael's grave as often as once a week. Michael wanted answers, but Martin has none, so on this day, as on so many others, he simply reaches down, scoops some pebbles from the hard-packed ground and places them atop the marble slab. This is Jewish tradition -- a sign that he was there, and a promise that he will come again soon.

In 1964, Phyllis and Martin Juman applied to Louise Wise Services for a child. After a lengthy and rigorous evaluation process, the baby they named Michael Lloyd Juman was placed with them in June 1965, when he was 5 months old. Two years later, the family moved to Merrick, N.Y., the kind of young and growing Long Island town where competition for grades at the local schools was matched only by competition to renovate and redecorate the cookie-cutter ranches and split-levels. One year after that, they adopted Marla, also from Louise Wise.

I grew up in Merrick. One of my best friends at the time was Randy Wolin, who had a younger brother named Todd. Todd's best friend was Michael Juman. In my memories, Michael is a little kid, hanging around us bigger kids, making pesky, mischievous little-kid kind of trouble.

Michael was a bright child with a passion for baseball; he was the pitcher on our high school's respectable, if not formidable, baseball team. It was during his senior year, in 1983, his parents say, that the first signs of a problem appeared. His economics teacher called Martin Juman to report that Michael, who had been one of his best students, had stopped coming to class.

The Jumans confronted their son that evening. ''I expected him to say: 'I did enough of school. I'm getting ready for college,''' Phyllis says. ''But he didn't say that. What he said was that he was so sad, that he's feeling such despair that he goes to the beach and walks along the ocean and he thinks of walking in and never coming out.''

At first his parents thought the depression was somehow linked to his feelings about being adopted. Had they explained it the wrong way when he was younger? Had they talked about it too often? Not often enough? Then, when they learned he had used a computer to falsify his high-school transcript, they thought the competitive environment at school was more than he could handle. That, they worried, was their fault, too.

For the rest of the school year and most of the summer, Michael met regularly with a psychologist, but the hours of talking seemed only to deepen his sadness. He slept all the time, and when he was awake his behavior was moody, bordering on bizarre.

Despite his deteriorating health, he insisted on leaving as scheduled for Eastern Michigan University, where he roomed with Todd Wolin, who promised the Jumans that he would take care of his childhood friend. Michael struggled through the first semester, then returned home. This time his parents sent him to a psychiatrist, who tried a variety of medications, none of which worked well enough or for long enough. In 1985, looking for clues about how best to treat this patient, the psychiatrist wrote to Louise Wise and asked for any medical information that might shed light on Michael's mental state.

A letter from the agency in response described Michael's birth mother as having had ''a history of episodic depressions for which she was treated psychiatrically,'' and said: ''She became involved with the birth father impulsively after the sudden death of her fiance. We have very little information about the birth father or his family.'' The letter went on to say, ''I am sure that you realize that in 1965 we would have had much less concern about the possible organic nature of depression than we would today.'' It was signed by Barbara F. Miller, the coordinator of postadoption services.

Reading this, Martin and Phyllis were confused, but not alarmed. They did remember being told that Michael's birth mother had suffered ''some depression around the time of the birth,'' Martin says, ''and that she had sought counseling.'' They also remembered agreeing with the agency placement worker that such postpartum blues were to be expected in a woman who had lost her fiance and given birth so soon after.

What they did not remember was any mention of ''a history'' of depression or ''psychiatric'' treatment. Martin called Louise Wise upon receiving the letter, he says, and remembers being assured that the words used 20 years earlier and the words being used now were two ways of explaining the same thing. There was no cause, he was told, for concern.

His parents' objections notwithstanding, Michael enrolled at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University in nearby Greenvale, taking a double major in finance and economics. The Jumans feared that the added pressure would cripple him further, but Michael hoped that the semblance of normality would keep him from disintegrating completely.

At about that time, Michael's psychiatrist called Martin and Phyllis and explained that he could not help their son anymore. ''The brain is like a computer,'' Martin remembers being told, ''and Michael is missing a chip. Nobody can replace the chip. Maybe in 50 years they'll have something to compensate.'' That was the first time the diagnosis was schizophrenia.

Michael's first hospitalization followed within weeks. Over the years, there would be many more, one lasting a full year. He thought strangers were following him. He thought people were coming after him with an ax. When he was institutionalized, he would escape. When he was living at home, he would leave the house in the middle of the night, run for 25 miles at a time, then sleep for three days. He was treated with medications, with electroshock therapy, with behavior-modification therapy. His diagnoses changed as often as his medications and his moods: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder, all of the above. In 1986, he began to have seizures that were sudden, unpredictable and violent, so his parents took away his car and then his bicycle. His mother drove him to college, sitting in the library or cafeteria while he went to class.

In 1989, Michael learned that his sister had found her birth mother, and he became consumed by the need to do the same. He quickly learned the trick that most inquisitive adoptees in New York State come to know: the number on an adoptive birth certificate is the same as the number on the original birth certificate. He spent hours in the New York Public Library poring over the tiny print in the huge books that list births by borough. Eventually, he found a matching certificate for a baby -- the baby he had been -- whose birth mother, Florence Dayboch, had named him Bruce.

There are seven Daybochs listed in the New York metropolitan area, and Michael called them all. ''My name is Bruce Dayboch,'' he would say. ''My mother was Florence. Do you know anything about me?'' Most said no, or did not respond to the messages he left. Finally, one person on the list -- Barry Dayboch -- answered his call. ''Hello, cuz,'' Barry said. Florence Dayboch, Michael's birth mother, was Barry's aunt.

Michael took his parents and sister with him to meet Barry. Soon into the visit Michael began to explain his mental illness. ''Aunt Florence had mental problems, too,'' Barry said, and described visiting his aunt in a psychiatric institution when he was a child. ''They made me wait downstairs,'' he said.

''How old were you?'' Michael asked.

Barry said he was ''about 7, 8 or 9.''

''What year was that?'' Martin asked, afraid of the answer. Barry guessed that it would have been 1961, '62 or '63. At least two years before Michael was born.

Barry then said that his aunt had had ''some kind of operation'' long before Barry himself was born.

''What kind of operation?'' Martin asked.

Barry knew the name of the procedure, but he could not bring himself to say the word aloud. ''I'm not sure,'' he said instead. ''An operation on her brain.''

The Jumans held an emotional family meeting that night. Michael, certain that Louise Wise had conspired against him, begged his parents to bring a lawsuit. Marla agreed with her brother. Martin was reluctant.

''I kept defending the agency,'' he remembers. ''I thought that maybe Florence had fooled them. When Michael was in one of his O.K. periods, a stranger who just talked to him for a little while could walk away without knowing anything was wrong. Maybe that's what happened with Louise Wise.''

Phyllis, too, was hesitant to sue. ''It will give us unrest, it will give us unhappiness,'' she said, trying to persuade her son to drop the idea. ''Let's just put it aside and go on with our lives.''

Her fear, she told Michael, was that the heartache of a lawsuit would be too much for him. It would sap his already limited energies and keep him from getting well. It would also put added pressure on her husband, who had suffered three heart attacks, all of which doctors attributed to stress in the years since Michael had become ill. But there was a third reason, one she did not share that night. She kept it inside, where it gnawed and burned. To win such a lawsuit, she knew, she would have to swear that she would not have adopted her son had she known his medical history.

''I didn't want to have to stand up in any courtroom and say, 'I wouldn't have chosen this child,''' she says. ''How do you say that to your son -- I never would have adopted you? At one point they offered us a Native American baby, and we said no, we didn't think we could handle it. And we would have said no about this too.''

In the end, Martin agreed to do as Michael and Marla wanted. The family vote was 3 to 1. Fearing his mother would try to reargue the decision with his father, Michael turned to Martin and said, ''Promise me, Dad.'' Martin promised.

The family hired a lawyer, Leonard R. Sperber, and in 1991 sued Louise Wise Services for wrongful adoption, the first such case in New York State. They also subpoenaed all relevant records from the adoption agency. Then, in the tradition of the American legal system, they waited.

The slow pace was torture to Michael, and he set out to find answers on his own. One day he triumphantly presented his parents with Florence Dayboch's confidential psychiatric and medical charts, which he somehow procured from Brooklyn State Hospital. The hundreds of pages of the chart confirmed Barry's memory that Florence had undergone a lobotomy. It took place in the mid-1940's, at least 17 years before Michael was born. It also provided a diagnosis -- schizophrenia, hebephrenic type, meaning that its main symptoms were disorganized speech, disorganized behavior and flat or inappropriate affect. But it did not prove that Louise Wise knew these things when Michael was placed for adoption.

For that evidence, Michael wheedled from Barry the phone number of Herbert Dayboch, one of Florence's brothers. Using the family answering machine, Michael secretly recorded all his conversations with his birth uncle, asking the same questions in countless ways.

''When you saw her, were you able to see a scar on her head?'' he asked, hoping to prove that the evidence of the surgery would have been obvious to Louise Wise social workers.

''No,'' Herbert said. ''I don't remember any scar.''

''What was she like after the operation? Was she able to speak to you?'' In other words, were her symptoms so extreme that the agency could not have missed them?

''Off and on. Sometimes she was depressed. She was irrational at times.''

When Michael asked if Herbert could put him in touch with Florence, he insisted that he didn't know where she was.

''Please, Herbert,'' Michael said, certain that his uncle was hiding something. ''I beg you, because I don't know what to do. She was my mother. My blood mother. I'll just look at her from a distance -- I don't have to talk to her. People don't live long with those kinds of diseases. I just want to see her before she passes away. That's my wish.''

Less than six months after that conversation Michael died. It was Marla who found him, lying on the bed in the apartment his parents had been renting for him so he could have some independence. There were several bags of groceries on the counter. He looked as if he were asleep.

Although he had attempted suicide a number of times, and although 10 percent of schizophrenia patients do commit suicide, his family does not believe that Michael meant to kill himself this time. The Nassau County coroner agreed, ruling that the death was the result of either a seizure or a toxic buildup of medications in his body. Under manner of death, he wrote, ''Undetermined.''

When Dr. Pablo V. Gejman, Director of the Schizophrenia Genetics Research Program at the University of Chicago, lectures on the history of schizophrenia, he shows a striking graphic. On it, a jagged line charts the medical journal articles written between 1912 and 1996 that include the key words ''schizophrenia'' and ''genetics.'' The line tracks almost directly upward between 1918 and 1935, meaning that there was great awareness during those years that the disease ran in families.

In 1935, however, the line falls almost as suddenly as it rose. The eugenics experiments of the Nazis -- their belief that mental illness could be eradicated by mass execution of all who had it -- so horrified scientists that they turned their attention to the environmental roots of disease, specifically schizophrenia, with which the Nazis were particularly obsessed. Between 1959 and 1966, the line is completely flat. These were the years of the schizophrenogenic-mother theory, the belief, now discredited, that a mother's inability to nurture her child properly was the root of the disease. Michael Juman was born on that flat, ill-informed line.

In 1965, privacy was the cornerstone of all adoption. The Spence-Chapin adoption agency did not even have a sign on its door back then, so that those who entered could keep their business a secret from passing strangers. Birth mothers were told almost nothing about the adoptive parents, who, in turn, were told very little about the birth mothers.

Given that practice, there was thought to be no reason to share information as unpleasant as a history of mental illness. At best, it would somehow ''taint'' the child. At worst, it would influence the way the parents treated that child, and since environment was thought to be all-powerful, that would create a self- fulfilling prophecy.

''A child came into an adoptive home almost a blank slate,'' says Ronny Diamond, the director of the postadoption department at Spence-Chapin Services to Families and Children. ''That's when the personality began to be formed. It was thought that if you shared social information, such as the birth mother not knowing who the father was, you might plant the notion in the adoptive family that the child might be promiscuous. The only effect would be to scare the adoptive parents.''

Louise Wise and its lawyers did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for this article, but the documents the agency has filed in the case, which is still winding its way through the courts, give every reason to believe that this was the philosophy and practice there as well. Dr. Viola Bernard, who died last year, was the chief consulting psychiatrist at Louise Wise during the period when Michael Juman was adopted. ''In 1965, there was a debate and difference of opinion (both in the field of psychiatry and among those professionals active in the adoption process) as to the inheritability of schizophrenia,'' she said in a 1996 affidavit for the Juman lawsuit.

''The standard and practice,'' to which Louise Wise subscribed, she continued, ''was not to disclose a prior psychiatric history of the natural parents.''

Kathleen Kelly, who as executor of Bernard's will has spent recent months cataloguing her papers, elaborates. Back then, sharing such information ''would be seen as condemning the kid to be stigmatized forever,'' she says. ''If you labeled that kid as being the child of a schizophrenic mother, there would be no hope for placing that baby. Any information that would be deemed to be destructive to the relationship between adoptive parents and children would not be disclosed.''

In the 1960's, Seymour Kety, then a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health, released the results of a landmark series of schizophrenia studies, which slowly began to overturn the belief that schizophrenia was an environmental disease, caused by the cold behavior of mothers. Kety found that children who are born to schizophrenic mothers and are then adopted develop the disease at the same rate as children who are reared by their schizophrenic mothers. The risk of developing schizophrenia in the population at large, Kety and others established, is approximately 1 percent. The child of one schizophrenic parent has a 12 percent risk. The child of two schizophrenic parents has a risk between 40 and 50 percent.

The growing recognition that schizophrenia had a genetic element paralleled an awareness that most disease in general has a genetic element. That, in turn, led to a change in how adoption agencies viewed a child's medical history. In New York State, for instance, where Louise Wise is based, a 1983 law required agencies to provide adopted children and adoptive parents with nonidentifying medical information, including ''all available information setting forth conditions or diseases believed to be hereditary, any drugs or medication taken during pregnancy by the child's natural mother and any other information, including any psychological information . . . which may be a factor influencing the child's present or future health.''

It was because of that law that the Juman family finally received Florence Dayboch's medical records from Louise Wise in 1996 -- 11 years after they were first requested by Michael's psychiatrist, 5 years after the lawsuit was filed and 2 years after Michael died. Martin and Phyllis were on vacation in California when the package was delivered to their hotel. Martin tore the envelope open in the lobby and started to read. He had to stop because he became physically ill.

One page contained the social worker's summary of what she had told the couple at the time of adoption. It was just as Martin and Phyllis remembered: ''I told the J.'s that Michael's parents were both Jewish. The mother was along in her 30's, of medium coloring. Her father had died when she was quite young, leaving her with an older mother after her three brothers had left home. She did not have a very good relationship with her mother. She won a scholarship to a well-known college and finished two years of it. The mother had been going out with someone seriously, but he died suddenly of a heart attack and so she could not marry him. She became pregnant quite soon after. She said that if her boyfriend had not died, she would not have become pregnant. This shock led to some emotional difficulty and she later sought professional help for it. The baby's father was white Jewish, but in character was not one of lasting quality. At this point the J.'s looked very compassionate, and Mr. J. said he could see that the replacement was for her loss. They were both very understanding of this whole history and did not have any questions outside of Mr. J.'s comment.''

Everything else in the file, however, proved that this sugarcoated description was, at best, half the truth. Yes, Florence did attend college for two years: ''Her grades were satisfactory at first, then Florence was unable to maintain her usual high standards. There was a gradual deterioration . . . and then she had an emotional collapse on Oct. 6, 1945, with behavior characterized by screaming, swearing, shouting and hallucinations.''

She spent four years in the hospital after that collapse, the file said, during which time she had a ''prefrontal lobotomy.'' She was out of the hospital for seven years, but returned and spent nine more years there. During that time she gave birth to a daughter, whose adoption was handled by Louise Wise.

Florence was released from Brooklyn State in 1962 or '63 (here, as elsewhere, the medical record has discrepancies) and was enrolled in an outpatient program called Fountain House. She returned to Louise Wise in 1964, five months into her pregnancy with Michael. At that time, she was ''disheveled in appearance, wearing a coat of three-quarter length that was raggedy around the buttonholes and did not fit her properly,'' the Louise Wise social worker wrote. ''Her disheveled hair was held away from her face by a red band, and on one occasion she chewed the end of her hair, which is badly in need of cutting. . . . She laughed in an inappropriate manner on innumerable occasions. Throughout the interview she chewed noisily on gum.''

As for the tragic death of Florence's fiance, there is no mention of such a man anyplace in the 55-page record. (When I interviewed her brother Herbert for this article, he said he had no memory of his sister's ever dating or becoming engaged.) There is, however, information about the man described to the Jumans as ''not of lasting quality.'' The ''putative father is xxxxxxx,'' the record says, and the name of the man is left blank. ''Occupation unknown. . . . She initially met this man at Brooklyn State Hospital, but they were casual acquaintances. [He] attended Fountain House on one or two occasions, and then all of a sudden, according to mother, he telephoned one day and asked her to go with him to his apartment. Florence had difficulty expressing her feelings about this incident, which she does not completely understand.''

That is when Martin Juman became dizzy and nauseated. Michael's father had also been a mental patient.

On every page, it seemed to Martin, there was something else that sent his head spinning. A handwritten account dated September 1989, for instance, describes a call that Barbara Miller, head of postadoption services, received from a ''brother to Florence Dayboch.'' (Herbert Dayboch, who is not named in the document -- the space where a name would appear is left blank -- later confirmed that he was the caller.) Florence's brother ''told me about Michael Juman's several calls to him and asked for advice,'' Miller wrote. While Michael was leaving messages on Dayboch answering machines, Martin realized, the Daybochs were turning to Louise Wise for guidance.

Florence ''has been maintained in an adult residence in Queens,'' the record goes on. In other words, she was half an hour from Michael's house.

Florence's brother ''is very concerned that a meeting with Michael may worsen her condition, which is at best not stable,'' Miller's note continues. ''I explained that even if F. were well, the law would permit her to retain her anonymity. [Herbert Dayboch] feels comfortable (his suggestion) with the idea of telling M. that Florence refuses to be identified.

''He expressed some concern for M.'s 'pain,' eventually agreeing that it might be more painful for Michael to meet his b. Mo. [He] has already alerted his family (those listed in telephone books) to refer all calls to him.''

So that was why no one returned the phone calls, Martin realized.

Most horrifying to him were the pages at the end of the document. Single-spaced and densely typed, they were a caseworker's account of her hours of interviews with the Jumans before they were accepted as adoptive parents. Here and there sentences were underlined: ''The background isn't terribly important, as long as the child is white they wouldn't worry too much. Mrs. J. feels that even if the father was a criminal or something of this nature, it doesn't mean the child will reflect these things at all. . . . They are pretty sure that environment is far more important than heredity.''

The Jumans now think they know the meaning of these underlined sentences. It was explained in Dr. Bernard's affidavit. ''In each instance,'' she said, ''the Agency's professionals, in intake and interviewing, carefully evaluated the prospective adoptive parents with a view toward identifying parents who could respond to uncertainties in adoption. In the event that there was a child whose natural parents were known to have a psychiatric history . . . the Agency's practice was to place such child only with parents who expressed a lack of concern over hereditary factors.''

Barbara Miller now volunteers at the Children's Aid Society twice a week, which is where I reached her, briefly, by phone.

''I want you to know one thing,'' she said, while explaining that she could not speak to me because of the pending lawsuit. ''Do you know that when one does a family study one of the areas you discuss is what are the concerns of the family about background? Once they say they aren't concerned, you don't hit them over the head with it.''

Another Louise Wise adoptee, given the name Connie by her birth mother 36 years ago, did not know anything of the Jumans, nor anything about schizophrenia, when she met with Barbara Miller in 1988, at the Manhattan offices of Louise Wise. Connie's adoptive parents had been told that her birth mother was 28 years old, Jewish, a brilliant student who was also a social worker and a nurse. Being an unwed mother, she felt she could not keep the baby, but was emotionally distraught about her decision to surrender the child and had to be hospitalized because she had a breakdown during the pregnancy. Because of that, Connie's adoptive family was warned, the baby's birth certificate would carry the address of a psychiatric hospital.

Those few facts were not enough for Connie, who is now known by another name, which she asked not to be used in order to protect her children's privacy. Newly wed in 1988, she felt she could not responsibly start a family unless she knew more of her own genetic history. Her need to know brought her to Miller. ''C. had a few questions about her birth mother, and I simply repeated that the decision had been a very difficult one for her,'' Miller's notes of the meeting read. ''To her question as to how long her mother was in the hospital, I said that I thought that her mother was still there, at the point that C. was surrendered, that she really had been quite hard-hit by this whole experience.

''C. threw her arms around me to kiss me before she left, saying that she was happy to have this information and pleased that I had not made difficulties about giving it to her.''

Connie remembers that hug. When she thinks of it, she shudders. She and her husband have had three children since the 1988 meeting with Miller. Shortly after her youngest was born, Connie called Louise Wise again, out of a ''nagging curiosity'' that she cannot explain. Miller had left, so Connie scheduled an appointment with her replacement.

Moments into this second meeting the woman was called away. Connie glanced down at the papers she had left lying on the desk. Next to the line for ''Health History Birth Mother'' was the word ''schizophrenic.''

''The rest of our conversation,'' Connie says, ''was a blur.''

For weeks afterward, she says, she barely ate or slept. Her husband describes ''holding her all night while she cried.'' The couple read everything they could find about schizophrenia, and are only somewhat relieved that Connie herself is well beyond the age of onset for the disease, which typically strikes in the late teens or early 20's.

It is the children they worry about. Connie ''watches them under a microscope,'' she says. ''The experts say the first symptoms can be confused with acting out and unacceptable behavior. Every time one of them throws a tantrum, I wonder, 'Is this just a normal thing or is this the beginning?'''

Connie takes no comfort from the fact that second-degree relatives, which is what her children are, have a far lower risk of schizophrenia -- about 5 percent. She is also not calmed by the knowledge that schizophrenia is not purely a genetic disorder. More likely, geneticists say, what is inherited is the susceptibility to the disease, which must then intersect with as-yet-unknown environmental factors.

''However they play with the numbers, if it's a 5 percent risk instead of a 1 percent risk, then my kids still have a five times greater risk,'' she says. ''When I was pregnant I had amnios. If, God forbid, there was something wrong, I would have had an abortion. So, if I'd known this was in my past, I would not have had children. How could you pass this disease on when you know about it?''

Like Michael Juman, Connie began to search for information about her birth mother, finally petitioning the state to have her adoption documents unsealed. Was the woman (who is identified in her records simply as E.) ''exceptionally bright,'' as Connie and her parents had been told? Maybe. ''She was described as an exceptionally intelligent girl,'' a caseworker wrote in 1962, ''though she is not in complete contact with reality at the present time.''

Had her mother in fact worked as a nurse, specifically a licensed practical nurse? That is unclear. ''She had a very sporadic employment record,'' the document says.

As for the ''breakdown,'' the medical history lists the diagnosis as ''schizophrenia, catatonic type.'' She was treated for it as an inpatient at Rockland State Psychiatric Hospital in 1956, 1958 and 1960 and at Jacobi Hospital in 1962.

And the father of her baby, who left her feeling so distraught that she did not want to talk about it? ''E. conceived the child while she was hospitalized for psychiatric care at Jacobi Hospital. [Connie's maternal grandmother] maintained that her daughter was raped by a fellow patient there. . . . Following the birth, E. seemed completely out of touch with reality, did not accept the fact that she had had relations with a man nor did she accept the fact that she had had a baby.''

Like Michael Juman's, Connie's records also include accounts of her parents' discussions with a caseworker. Also like Michael's, sentences have been underlined:

''In response to question about their knowledge of illnesses with hereditary implications, [Connie's adoptive father] thought of diabetes or mental illness. When questioned further, he said that he really didn't know the significance nor does he truly worry about it.''

The nature-versus-nurture equation is not the only measure of the distance traveled in the past 30 years. Today being a victim means telling your story. For decades the Jumans tried to honor Michael's privacy, rarely talking of his adoption beyond the circle of family. Later they tried to keep his illness a secret too, although that became impossible as he spiraled downward.

After Michael's death, however, the family inched toward the spotlight -- local cable news led to local newspapers, which led to the national news. After each interview, strangers called, and all of them had similar tales to tell.

People like Melanie Englander, now 34, who first asked Louise Wise for her medical records in 1990 and was told what her adoptive parents had been told 34 years earlier: that her birth mother was a clerical worker who enjoyed music and bowling. Not until Englander asked again, four years later, was she told that the woman had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

People like Lisa Salatino, now 40, who asked Louise Wise for her medical information in 1988, before starting to have a family. She was told that her birth mother had curly red hair, very light blue eyes, a high-school diploma and a background in classical piano. Satisfied that there were no genetic land mines in her past, Salatino gave birth to a daughter, then found her birth mother a year later. The woman she met suffered from schizophrenia and had been repeatedly hospitalized since she was a teen-ager.

While researching this article, I spoke to six families with such stories. Three have already filed lawsuits against the agency. Two more have evidence that seems to prove that Louise Wise knew of the birth mother's schizophrenia. The sixth, a man whose adopted son has been hospitalized at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center for 10 years, has still not received his son's records, after a number of requests for them.

Like Michael, these families have one question: Why? They are unimpressed with talk of swinging pendulums or the evolving state of genetic knowledge. They are certain that it was more deliberate, more conspiratorial and more evil than that. They point to recent news articles about adoptive parents who learn years later that their child's birth mother had such secrets as a history of drug abuse or H.I.V. Like so many people to whom the unthinkable has happened, they find it easy to believe other unthinkable things.

I have spent hours in recent months debating the question of blame with Martin Juman. He is passionate and eloquent in his belief that what was done to his family back in 1965 was deliberate, inexcusable and wrong. I, in turn, agree that the family was wronged -- in 1985, when they asked for Michael's medical records and, despite the law authorizing release of medical information, were not given the truth. The falsehoods of 1965, I think, are far less clear.

We are, as a society, perpetually ignorant; it is only what we are ignorant of that changes.

In the past 30 years, therefore, so much has been learned but very little is different. In those decades we have traveled from an age of too little information to an age of too much. We are now at an interim moment in history, a time when we are deluged with data but have not yet developed either a context for what we know or a practical way to use it. Just as we once underestimated the consequences of our genes, we are now in danger of overestimating them. We are allowing the nature-nurture balance to tip too far the other way, toward the belief that genes, and genes alone, are our destiny.

Buried in all the talk about genetics lately is the understanding that few common diseases are purely genetic. What is inherited is not a fate but a tendency. For the most part it is the interaction between genetics and environment that causes or prevents disease. That interaction, that subtlety, has been lost in the prevailing view of genes as omnipotent. Here, near the turn of the millennium, there is a price for genetic knowledge, and it is often paid in fear.

Of the two evils -- knowing nothing about her past, or knowing more than she can handle -- Connie has no doubt which she would choose. ''By withholding the information, they robbed us of choices,'' she says. ''Not just my parents, not just me, but my children. The truth might have been destructive, but it would have been the truth. Secrets destroy even more.''

After visiting Michael's grave, Martin Juman makes one more stop within the Wellwood Cemetery. He has a harder time finding this burial site, because he does not visit it often.

The evening of Michael's funeral, Barry Dayboch came to the Juman home. He was grieving for more than the loss of his cousin. ''I betrayed Michael,'' he told Martin and Phyllis. Florence, he said, died eight months earlier. Barry knew of her death and even attended her funeral. He did not tell Michael because he feared it would ''send him over the edge.''

Martin does not touch this headstone as he did Michael's. He just stands before it for long minutes and stares. Then he walks away, without looking back and without leaving any small pebbles of remembrance behind.